Going Passive: Social-Media is Shifting

18 Apr, 2026

I’ve read an article in The Guardian about a potential falling out of Britains with social media use. One of the passages stands out to me:

“ A central issue driving the data is the changing nature of social media itself. The rise of apps such as TikTok and the popularity of video features including Instagram’s Reels mean that people are consuming social media more passively and are less likely to take an active role, a change compared with how they might have behaved on platforms such as Facebook.” (Dan Milmo: * Is the UK falling out of love with social media?*) ¹

It might be obvious for you but this observation absolutely struck me. If I think back to the old days of using Facebook, still at school, it is remarkable how drastically the day to day use of social media has changed. Back then, the feed consisted, if I remember correctly, purely of content that people I actually knew in real life had posted – maybe besides some very obvious ads. I still vividly remember going through Christmas pictures of classmates together with my parents and us wondering and being amused about how much of the private life of others we were allowed to see.

I do not use Facebook anymore and never had an Instagram account. This certainly distorts my perception, as somewhere within that macro change I switched to Reddit and Twitter, now X. Of course, these are completely different kinds of social media. And yet. It all starts with actually leaving Facebook and not signing up to Instagram – this would have been unthinkable a few years earlier, I guess.

At the same time, influencer and content-creator have become generally accepted means to earn a living, to become rich and famous even. While taking a walk in the park, I watched two dudes with a camera, one of them slowly walking in the direction of the camera, giving some kind of talk. Of course, I don’t know what these guys were up to – but in that moment, I had no doubt they were producing content for social media. So we have apparently shifted from a medium in which many share some to one in which few share a lot. A switch from an intimate – yet obviously often carefully arranged – look into the life of friends, relatives and friends of friends to a (semi-)professional show created by strangers. Back then and now people post to gain attention. Yet, in the early days this was focused on attention and status within existing, relatively closely defined social circles. Now it is attention of strangers that is mostly sought to be monetized in some way. This monetization goes hand in hand with a professionalization – a trend that seems similar to how Uber has developed. What started in the US mostly with the idea of using your care and some spare-time to make some spare-money, has quickly developed into the job of the Uber driver.

This has positive effects: The power of a few gatekeepers continues to crumble. Independent journalists or young investors researching and writing up stocks on their own can earn a living on an app like Substack. Obviously, this same shift of power also has negative effects, most notably a crumbling of journalistic standards and the dedication to stick to the truth. AI pours oil on that fire.

There is another negative development that the article talks about, that I touched upon in an earlier blogpost: Social media was clearly good at hooking its users from day one on. But it has gotten better and better at doing so. It is interesting to look at this observation in tandem with the shift from private posts to semiprofessional ones. I would’ve thought that being able to gain intimate insights into the private lives of peers was more engaging than consuming what strangers had to say. The prospects of monetization enlist content producers in the mission to construct ever better hooks. Click-bait has been perfected, the shift from image to video does the rest.

As the article outlines, an increasing number of people are aware of using a highly addictive product. Nobody wants to be addicted. I can imagine that not many years from now, a company like Meta might be increasingly seen in the same light as a tobacco company today. This would pose a significant long-term risk to shareholders by the way: Tobacco companies are left out of many index-funds and professional funds. Many people dislike taking a share of a profit of a company that harms its users. Much lower valuations are only one of the direct consequences. Increasing regulation would be a certain result, too. I also wonder if the ongoing switch to consume content created by semiprofessionals ends up leading to sites similar to those inner-city ghost-towns where sky-high rents have first pushed out any residents, subsequently any active life and finally even the rent paying offices.

So where do people flee to? First off: Most of them, including myself, obviously stick with most of their social media accounts for the time being. It is one thing to hate to be addicted but quite another to actually quit that addiction. I do think, however, that the rise of local, analogue communities such as running clubs is a direct consequence of people yearning for the personal connections mass social media cannot offer any more. I recently read an interesting article about a book event in London that also perfectly fits the bill.²

What I find especially interesting in this trend is what I would call a return to the principles of exclusion. The initial promise of Facebook and Co was its radical inclusion, nullifying the importance of physical proximity and at least pretending to reduce the role of social hierarchies. Compare this to community hubs until the early 2000s. Think, for instance, of the tennis club as the arena in which middle and upper middle class might have played out most of their social dramas and longings for attention, status and kinship in the 80s. By nature, every member lives in relatively close proximity to the club. Almost as naturally comes the threshold based on status and economics. Finally, taste and preferences: If you fit the preconditions, you might still have had a choice between the local tennis or golf club. Friendships were formed in those clubs, marriages destroyed and new ones initiated, business deals made. All this happened (and obviously still happens to some degree) in a closely restricted space of relative equals. You can still be disgusted by other members of this club, but you can trust to have many similarities – at least on a superficial level. You can also trust to see that guy you are disgusted with again next weekend. You might also face him in the yearly tournament. Hence, you will have very good reasons to keep your disgust to yourself and your close peers.

Online, as we all know so well, one of the most efficient ways to find and attract the attention of like-minded people consists in contributing to destroy somebody seen as completely different and therefore stupid and evil. Exclusion as a means to form inner cohesion. This is not new. My point is to note the shift of responsibility for this exclusion: In the example of the 80’s tennis club, it is the club itself that performs huge amounts of the work of exclusion. Online, everybody has to contribute a much larger share to this endeavor.

I hope this does not sound cynical. Of course, not everybody is forced to devalue or fight others. Far from it. I would argue that the other, more common and civil strategy, consists in retreating. Whenever I spend more time in Berlin, I notice signs of such an inner retreat. There are probably too many similar people as well as too many beggars asking for money. When I lived in Berlin and spent a few days in a smaller town, I was shocked to notice that my initial reflex to somebody approaching me for directions was to say ‘no, sorry’ and walk on. I guess there is a very natural limit to remaining open to the full complexity and humanity of strangers.

Thus: attack or retreat. And the latter might be exactly what we see in an increasingly passive use of social-media.